As a child, I remember asking my mum for a videocassette that I had my eyes on in the grocery store. Any normal preschooler would be asking for some sort of cartoon, but not me. My passion was musicals, and one actress, who had blonde curls and dimples, just like me, stood out the most.

ShirleyTemple, “America’s Little Darling,“ was that one actress. And that movie I mentioned asking for earlier? No ordinary 1990’s child, I was asking my mother to buy me a sing-along VHS tape of ShirleyTemple’s best known songs. That tape stayed with me until I reached the age of 8 – by which point, I had played it so often, that it had actually become unplayable.

When I found out that Shirley had passed away on February 10th – I suddenly felt very emotional, as if I had just lost a part of my childhood, which, in all honesty, I really did. I grew up with her songs and films, I grew up idolizing her, I grew up with this dream of being just like Shirley – and of one day meeting her. Neither of these dreams will become a reality for me anymore – but I know that, along with other childhood favourites, ShirleyTemple will always be something I hold close to me.

Conventional wisdom holds that baby names tend to follow the Hundred-Year-Rule, cycling back after a century has passed. But with everything speeding up exponentially in modern life, and with the great interest in all things mid-century, we’re thinking maybe we should change that to the Fifty-Year-Rule.

But digging deeper into the data, we find an interesting mix of revival possibilities—all of them missing from today’s Top 1000, and most of them gone for decades. Towards the lower end we find vestiges of a still earlier time—names like Percy and Virgil, Myrtle and Minerva— as well as nickname names that have been lost to time, some ethnic choices no longer prominent here, plus more archetypal midcentury names which might possibly be ready to return.